“Do you know, I never even told them about the treasure. All this time, they believed you’d simply vanished. That you were very likely dead. And then, earlier this year, my wife convinced me to make a clean breast of things. To tell Justin and Neville about what you’d done.” Tom’s expression grew somber. “That’s when I learned that you visited Neville’s sickbed the night you disappeared. That you told him someone was hurting you.”

Alex recoiled from Tom’s words.

“Neville says it was one of Crenshaw’s friends. Someone at the apothecary shop.”

“Good God, Tom,” Alex said hoarsely. “Do you think I want to relive this?”

“What happened?” Tom asked. “Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Tell me his name.”

“Is that why you came here? To hear every sordid detail of why I left North Devon?” Alex muttered an oath. “I was a boy of twelve. It was decades ago.”

“They’re all dead, you know,” Tom casually informed him. “Sir Oswald. Cheevers. The men who beat us, starved us—fathered one of us.”

A derisive smile edged Alex’s mouth. “Only one of us?”

Tom contemplated him from across the table. “I don’t know if Sir Oswald was your father. I only ever found proof that he was Justin’s. But looking at you now… My God, but you resemble the man.”

It was the worst sort of praise.

To think that he looked like Sir Oswald Bannister. A gentleman renowned for being a wastrel. A lecher.

“How did he die?” Alex asked.

“He fell from the cliffs not long after Justin bought the Abbey. He’d been drinking.”

“And Cheevers?” Leonard Cheevers had run the orphanage. Had beat them, and withheld their food for the smallest infractions.

A look of satisfaction came over Tom’s face. “Tried and executed for theft. They hanged him in the public square.”

Alex briefly rested his head in his hands. “Perhaps there is justice in the world.”

“I believe that,” Tom said. “Eventually, it comes to us all.”

“That doesn’t bode well for me.”

“Have you committed so many crimes since you left North Devon?”

“Not crimes, no. Nothing like betraying my friends and leaving them to die.”

Tom’s light blue eyes softened behind his spectacles. “None of us died, Alex. None of us suffered any more than we already had. If that’s been on your conscience these twenty or more years—”

“It has.” Alex gave a huff of humorless laughter. It had ruined his life.

“You can’t be doing so badly. You’re newly married, traveling in high style through France. Besides, even if justice did come for you, you’d have something to weigh against your sins.”

“I don’t know what.”

“You saved Neville’s life.”

Alex clenched his fist where it lay. The memories were too painful. Too raw, despite the intervening years.